The on-board USB ports on my Dell Poweredge 400SC died about 4-5 months ago. I installed a Zonet 4+1Port USB2.0 PCI Card(VIA Chipset), and haven't had any problems until recently. The following error message would pop up in my systray:


Clicking that yields:



I went ahead and disabled that unknown device, yet the systray message will still pop up every so often. It's quite annoying. Can you guys/gals give any pointers as to how to correct this error?

I'm running Windows XP Pro SP2. Thanks in advance for any input.

PS, Here is a screenshot of my USB under Device Manager:

What do you have connected to the USB ports? It seems that windows is having a problem with something connected to the ports.

I believe the error messages are coming from the on-board ports that I don't use anymore. I don't have anything plugged into those.

Out of the 4 available ports on the PCI add-on card, this is what I have connected:

a. external hard drive (always never powered on)
b. logitech gamepad
c. cable for digital camera
d. cable for mp3 player

Have you tried unplugging all 4 of those devices while the system is powered down

and then turning the system back on?

This should eliminate the possibility it is one of those devices.

Let me try that & see if any error messages occur while NO usb devices are attached. Will report later.

Less than an hour after I powered down, unplugged ALL usb devices and rebooted, the error message came back. That leaves me to believe that it's the "dead" on-board usb ports that are acting up.



Any new suggestions?

That's good, though -

we've eliminated one possibility.


If no one else comes along with a suggestion,

I wonder if you will still get that problem if you remove the USB card?

That would certainly show that it is the on-board USBs.


Can, or did, you go into BIOS and disable the on board USB ports?

As suggested by JohnWho, I went into the BIOS & disabled the on-board USB. This is what shows now:



Hopefully, no more error messages. Thanks for all your input.

I probably should have suggested that first.





Hope you are OK now.

You'll have to disable the dead USB ports in Device Manager.
I believe that they are also the top 5 devices under USB in your Device Manager.
Also, Disable the Unknown Device just below that in Device Manager.